Rampart, 2010
20 x 40 inches
video and inkjet print
Rampart shows a pair of images: on the left a photograph made in 2001 and on the right a ten-minute looped video from 2010. The subject of the work is the infamous Rampart Police Station in Los Angeles, which was closed in 2008 after a series of public scandals that made it a symbol of municipal failure and endemic police misconduct. Rampart does what the de-commissioning of the station by the LAPD made more difficult: it memorializes the site in a pictorial space by combining two divergent temporal registers: a fraction of a second from 2001 (when the Rampart scandal was being discussed in the press), placed alongside an extended view in video from 2010, after historical amnesia has begun to take hold, making the absent image from the period of corruption by law enforcement a subject as a specter.
The image pair pieces use the model of a stereo pair, showing the same subject twice, but instead of using the slightly different vantage points of two eyes to activate the quasi-physiological illusion of depth, these works introduce another kind of difference.